Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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36 politics and governance
to believe that we must put our faith in the corporations as
the primary agent of change. Indeed, for the past 30 years we
have been exposed to a long and increasingly tedious celebration
of markets and an equally vigorous denigration of government.
26 Much of this was self-serving hype by people with
much to gain from less regulation, lower taxes, and little public
scrutiny. Much of it, too, was driven by the ideology of market
fundamentalism that thrived in some university economic
departments “through a remarkable level of conformism” and
throughout the extreme right of American politics through the
mystical power of true belief (Saul, 2005, p. 33). Some of it
emanated from right-wing think tanks created for the purpose
of spreading the worldview once held by the robber barons
with all of the compassion of the Social Darwinists and Calvin
Coolidge’s sense of public urgency. The defense of free markets,
in particular, was exaggerated and misleading, and some of it
destructive and dangerous. 27
Abstractions such as the corporations and the market have
no interest in the long-term collective future beyond pecuniary
gain. Corporations are bundles of capital dedicated to near-term
profi tability of stockholders, not to the long-term sustainability
of the human enterprise. 28 Allegedly given the rights of persons
in 1886 in an otherwise insignifi cant case about payment
of back taxes, corporations have steadily acquired suffi cient
political clout to prevent changes in law and regulation that
would infringe on profi ts. 29 The power of K Street lobbyists in
Washington did not change when Tom Delay departed Congress.
Money, access, and power are as seductive to Democrats as
to Republicans. The implosion of Enron and more recently the
collapse of the housing and fi nancial markets are instructive not
as aberrations but as a persistent tendency in a system that has
been constructed around rules that protect the rights of capital
without the countervailing power of an alert government willing
and able to protect the public interest. Jonathon Porritt, the